6 ms·

I live about three hours away from D.C. and the suburbs where much of the government contracting takes place, and I'm going to make an offer that doesn't throw

by smoyer 13y ago

I live about three hours away from D.C. and the suburbs where much of the government contracting takes place, and I'm going to make an offer that doesn't throw more of the tax-payer's money into the fire. I will, at my own expense drive to D.C. and spend two days of my vacation evaluating the architecture of the failing system, and spot check the source code quality. Additionally, I'll add the project to my Sonar source code quality analyzer so that there's a focus on what code isn't up to industry standards and which sections should be addressed first. It's still astounding to me that we spent $700M on such a pathetic LITTLE system ... there simply isn't that much code to write. If there are others who'd like to show the government how it should be done, I'd be happy to start an open-source project to rewrite the whole project, as well as a CI/CT/CD/CM system to make sure that the code is maintainable, that changes are delivered in a reasonable amount of time and that servers are constructed and clustered in a consistent way. This really isn't rocket science (and it's a good thing ... there would have been deaths). EDIT: If someone in the government a) reads my offer and b) is willing to let "the industry" voluntarily help, you can contact me via the e-mail address on my profile page.

noonespecial 13y ago
They can't afford you for free. It would cost them so much more to vet you than using one of their usual "pre-approved" government contractors, it wouldn't even be worth their considering. Even if that could be done, no one would be willing to take responsibility for giving you access. The system is designed (or has evolved) specifically to diffuse this sort of responsibility. It would be impossible to focus it sharply enough to allow you to do this. The code is broken, but not the broken part of this system.
- smoyer 13y ago
  I made the offer with the assumption that there were three or four reasons it wouldn't be taken ... you've described one of them. The others are: b) The selected contractor won the work as payback for some political benefit, and the person who made sure they won can't allow them to be perceived as incompetent. c) They don't believe it's really broken so much as it just needs to be "tuned" (almost "the myth of sunk costs"). d) No one in the government cares ... so they're not reading our thoughts and comments on the system.
  - vinhboy 13y ago
    Reading your comments, I can really sense your frustration because I feel the same way. I live 15 minutes from California's state capital and this whole fiasco makes me want to just drive up there and do something.
- gngeal 13y ago
  They can't afford you for free. It would cost them so much more to vet you than using one of their usual "pre-approved" government contractors Why don't they vet the results instead of vetting the people? Isn't that what matters? Not even the Soviets believed that the grain imports from the US were poisoned in order to kill them.
dangrossman 13y ago
Nobody spent $700M on a website. Over 3 years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) spent $394 million in total to establish and operate the Federally Facilitated Exchanges. That includes building and staffing call centers, media outreach programs, consumer complaint tracking systems, tech support, employer support programs, all the integration and portals for the health insurance industry, integration with a dozen departments of the federal government, administrative staff, etc. The "Federally-facilitated Exchanges IT" contract awarded to CGI Federal Inc, which is the one that includes building the Healthcare.gov website among other services, was $55 million. The numbers are directly from the Government Accountability Office's report: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf That's still a big number, but it's over an order of magnitude less than yours. It should also be noted that not all of this money is coming from taxpayers. The GAO estimates that in fiscal year 2014, $450 million in fees will be collected from the insurance companies participating in the exchanges, and this money is directly credited to the account used to manage the FFE program.
- wikiburner 13y ago
  Nope, both sides are spinning like crazy here. 55 Million is a very old number. NBC News has released a report on what the actual numbers are. It's $196 Million as of 5/15/2013, and the price appears to be well on its way to $292 Million: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/53309356/ http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/53309356/ That was five months before the failed launch and the emergency overhaul that's now underway, so it looks like the final number could be even higher.
- smoyer 13y ago
  Thanks for the clarification ... I've seen lots of numbers but you're right that it's not really fair to include some of the other services. On the other hand, is the failure of the website making the call centers irrelevant (or otherwise increasing the effective waste)? I shouldn't have focused on any specific number as I'm really more interested in the huge failure in both the PM and execution of the software project. And I'd like to see contractors that fail miserably on one project removed from the list of companies that the government can use. EDIT: I've seen a lot of companies create more complex software at a small fraction of that price ... and many of those companies exited well below $55M with smiles on their faces.
chill1 13y ago
I wanted to send you a quick note that I'd be willing to help, on the off chance that you did manage to get that open source project going with government cooperation. Unfortunately, you do not have an email in your profile. And your website is throwing a 503 error.
- smoyer 13y ago
  Fixed and fixed! And thanks for pointing out the issue with my server (I'm in the process of replacing it!).
mattmcknight 13y ago
There is a lack of information here to correctly apportion blame between the government and the contractor here. While the general goals are certainly technically achievable, there are 44,000 pages of regulations generated from the affordable care act, in addition to the over 1,000 pages in the law itself. Just to dig through that and pull out everything related to insurance policy offering is going to take some serious time. In addition, each state has unique health care laws and regulations regarding the offer of insurance in that state. However, the biggest problem I have heard of is simply stupid requirements from the government. Rather than have an open market where an individual insurance customer or any curious person could look at all of the products and prices, they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. This lack of trust in us has caused a lack of trust in their system. It would seem that one thing that independent developers that want to help out could do would be to extract all of the useful data from the site. Gather all of the data about the plans and the pricing, and then make that available in a static searchable, filterable, browsable fashion without having to log in. Then, once people were able to do that, they could then go through the arduous identity verification process to qualify for a subsidy and get one of the plans. If it takes to long to crawl it out of the system, maybe you should file a FOIA request? Once you get a basic information system up and running, and ad funded, you could then hook it up to connect you to the live site.
- throwaway420 13y ago
  > they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. There are subsidy calculators out there that ask a few basic questions about income levels and you can get this information without requiring somebody's exact identity. The cynic in me suggests that this system was specifically designed to get somebody's identity because at some point this information is going to get funneled directly to the IRS with the goal of going after and hassling people who still can't afford healthcare.
- caseysoftware 13y ago
jcromartie 13y ago
Unfortunately, the government won't accept volunteers. It's really too bad, but everything has to be set in stone in a contract, and that means that the people who are already "in" are usually the only ones who can navigate the byzantine contract insanity.
TheCondor 13y ago
Is there an executive summary of the architecture and technologies? Something like this doesn't need more grandstanding, it's either good architecture with some bugs and scaling issues which are probably solvable or it's crap. Likewise is there some sort of jacked up insurance industry rules engine?
fpgeek 13y ago
If you want to know why no one in the federal government will take you up on your offer you should read about the Anti-Deficiency Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act http://www.gao.gov/legal/lawresources/antideficiencybackground.html http://www.gao.gov/legal/lawresources/antideficiencybackgrou... It was created because of tricks and workarounds past administrations have used to get around the legislative appropriations process. One of its provisions prohibits federal employees from accepting voluntary services for the government. From what I understand, the idea was to prevent people from volunteering today with the expectation of pressuring Congress to pay them tomorrow. And, to be clear, if it were legal I'd already be trying to find ways I could help.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  It makes a lot of sense, there are lots of things that you could do as a friendly helper that would steer the long term direction of an agency or program towards a particular vendor. If you were a Linux specialist, for instance and setup some system that ran solely on Linux, you would in effect be picking a platform and preventing vendors like Microsoft and IBM from competing. Obviously, paying some government contractor bazillions of dollars doesn't necessarily result in a great outcome, but these rules are there to stop the casual corruption that impacts the faith of the public in government.
  - thwarted 13y ago
    these rules are there to stop the casual corruption that impacts the faith of the public in government Because formal, institutionalized corruption doesn't breed lack of faith, I'm sure.
ssafejava 13y ago
While the server-side components may never become open-source or auditable (significant portions are based on existing, closed systems), the client-side code is easily auditable. If you have a chance, I would love to see what you would find by analyzing https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace. If you get a chance to look at it, please submit a PR.
shitlord 13y ago
The website apparently has over 500 million lines of Java code though. Nobody can cover all of that by themselves in 2 days. Undoing bad design decisions at this scale takes a LOT of work, a lot more than you are estimating. Even if there were 100 others like you, I doubt you guys could even put a dent in the problem.
- dodyg 13y ago
  Where do you get this number from?
jbooth 13y ago
LOL, I'm sure 2 days from the right guy are all that's required here.

by smoyer 13y ago

noonespecial 13y ago

They can't afford you for free. It would cost them so much more to vet you than using one of their usual "pre-approved" government contractors, it wouldn't even be worth their considering. Even if that could be done, no one would be willing to take responsibility for giving you access. The system is designed (or has evolved) specifically to diffuse this sort of responsibility. It would be impossible to focus it sharply enough to allow you to do this. The code is broken, but not the broken part of this system.

smoyer 13y ago
I made the offer with the assumption that there were three or four reasons it wouldn't be taken ... you've described one of them. The others are: b) The selected contractor won the work as payback for some political benefit, and the person who made sure they won can't allow them to be perceived as incompetent. c) They don't believe it's really broken so much as it just needs to be "tuned" (almost "the myth of sunk costs"). d) No one in the government cares ... so they're not reading our thoughts and comments on the system.
- vinhboy 13y ago
  Reading your comments, I can really sense your frustration because I feel the same way. I live 15 minutes from California's state capital and this whole fiasco makes me want to just drive up there and do something.
gngeal 13y ago
They can't afford you for free. It would cost them so much more to vet you than using one of their usual "pre-approved" government contractors Why don't they vet the results instead of vetting the people? Isn't that what matters? Not even the Soviets believed that the grain imports from the US were poisoned in order to kill them.

dangrossman 13y ago

Nobody spent $700M on a website. Over 3 years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) spent $394 million in total to establish and operate the Federally Facilitated Exchanges. That includes building and staffing call centers, media outreach programs, consumer complaint tracking systems, tech support, employer support programs, all the integration and portals for the health insurance industry, integration with a dozen departments of the federal government, administrative staff, etc. The "Federally-facilitated Exchanges IT" contract awarded to CGI Federal Inc, which is the one that includes building the Healthcare.gov website among other services, was $55 million. The numbers are directly from the Government Accountability Office's report: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf That's still a big number, but it's over an order of magnitude less than yours. It should also be noted that not all of this money is coming from taxpayers. The GAO estimates that in fiscal year 2014, $450 million in fees will be collected from the insurance companies participating in the exchanges, and this money is directly credited to the account used to manage the FFE program.

wikiburner 13y ago
Nope, both sides are spinning like crazy here. 55 Million is a very old number. NBC News has released a report on what the actual numbers are. It's $196 Million as of 5/15/2013, and the price appears to be well on its way to $292 Million: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/53309356/ http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/53309356/ That was five months before the failed launch and the emergency overhaul that's now underway, so it looks like the final number could be even higher.
smoyer 13y ago
Thanks for the clarification ... I've seen lots of numbers but you're right that it's not really fair to include some of the other services. On the other hand, is the failure of the website making the call centers irrelevant (or otherwise increasing the effective waste)? I shouldn't have focused on any specific number as I'm really more interested in the huge failure in both the PM and execution of the software project. And I'd like to see contractors that fail miserably on one project removed from the list of companies that the government can use. EDIT: I've seen a lot of companies create more complex software at a small fraction of that price ... and many of those companies exited well below $55M with smiles on their faces.

chill1 13y ago

I wanted to send you a quick note that I'd be willing to help, on the off chance that you did manage to get that open source project going with government cooperation. Unfortunately, you do not have an email in your profile. And your website is throwing a 503 error.

smoyer 13y ago
Fixed and fixed! And thanks for pointing out the issue with my server (I'm in the process of replacing it!).

mattmcknight 13y ago

There is a lack of information here to correctly apportion blame between the government and the contractor here. While the general goals are certainly technically achievable, there are 44,000 pages of regulations generated from the affordable care act, in addition to the over 1,000 pages in the law itself. Just to dig through that and pull out everything related to insurance policy offering is going to take some serious time. In addition, each state has unique health care laws and regulations regarding the offer of insurance in that state. However, the biggest problem I have heard of is simply stupid requirements from the government. Rather than have an open market where an individual insurance customer or any curious person could look at all of the products and prices, they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. This lack of trust in us has caused a lack of trust in their system. It would seem that one thing that independent developers that want to help out could do would be to extract all of the useful data from the site. Gather all of the data about the plans and the pricing, and then make that available in a static searchable, filterable, browsable fashion without having to log in. Then, once people were able to do that, they could then go through the arduous identity verification process to qualify for a subsidy and get one of the plans. If it takes to long to crawl it out of the system, maybe you should file a FOIA request? Once you get a basic information system up and running, and ad funded, you could then hook it up to connect you to the live site.

throwaway420 13y ago
> they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. There are subsidy calculators out there that ask a few basic questions about income levels and you can get this information without requiring somebody's exact identity. The cynic in me suggests that this system was specifically designed to get somebody's identity because at some point this information is going to get funneled directly to the IRS with the goal of going after and hassling people who still can't afford healthcare.
caseysoftware 13y ago

jcromartie 13y ago

Unfortunately, the government won't accept volunteers. It's really too bad, but everything has to be set in stone in a contract, and that means that the people who are already "in" are usually the only ones who can navigate the byzantine contract insanity.

TheCondor 13y ago

Is there an executive summary of the architecture and technologies? Something like this doesn't need more grandstanding, it's either good architecture with some bugs and scaling issues which are probably solvable or it's crap. Likewise is there some sort of jacked up insurance industry rules engine?

fpgeek 13y ago

If you want to know why no one in the federal government will take you up on your offer you should read about the Anti-Deficiency Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act http://www.gao.gov/legal/lawresources/antideficiencybackground.html http://www.gao.gov/legal/lawresources/antideficiencybackgrou... It was created because of tricks and workarounds past administrations have used to get around the legislative appropriations process. One of its provisions prohibits federal employees from accepting voluntary services for the government. From what I understand, the idea was to prevent people from volunteering today with the expectation of pressuring Congress to pay them tomorrow. And, to be clear, if it were legal I'd already be trying to find ways I could help.

Spooky23 13y ago
It makes a lot of sense, there are lots of things that you could do as a friendly helper that would steer the long term direction of an agency or program towards a particular vendor. If you were a Linux specialist, for instance and setup some system that ran solely on Linux, you would in effect be picking a platform and preventing vendors like Microsoft and IBM from competing. Obviously, paying some government contractor bazillions of dollars doesn't necessarily result in a great outcome, but these rules are there to stop the casual corruption that impacts the faith of the public in government.
- thwarted 13y ago
  these rules are there to stop the casual corruption that impacts the faith of the public in government Because formal, institutionalized corruption doesn't breed lack of faith, I'm sure.

ssafejava 13y ago

While the server-side components may never become open-source or auditable (significant portions are based on existing, closed systems), the client-side code is easily auditable. If you have a chance, I would love to see what you would find by analyzing https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace. If you get a chance to look at it, please submit a PR.

shitlord 13y ago

The website apparently has over 500 million lines of Java code though. Nobody can cover all of that by themselves in 2 days. Undoing bad design decisions at this scale takes a LOT of work, a lot more than you are estimating. Even if there were 100 others like you, I doubt you guys could even put a dent in the problem.

dodyg 13y ago
Where do you get this number from?

jbooth 13y ago

LOL, I'm sure 2 days from the right guy are all that's required here.